Shared Security

Overview

Shared security can allow applications, rollups, zones, or services to inherit validation and economic backing from a broader network. It may reduce the need for each system to recruit an entirely separate validator or trust base.

Inheritance is rarely complete. Data availability, execution, bridges, sequencers, governance, application code, and upgrade keys may remain separate failure domains. Shared infrastructure can also create correlated risk and transmit incidents across otherwise distinct systems.

Architects should state exactly which properties are inherited, under what conditions, and how failures propagate. Users need visibility into validator assumptions, slashing, governance, escape paths, dependencies, and the difference between common settlement and full application security.

Shared security lets multiple systems rely on a common validator, consensus, economic, or governance foundation for selected security guarantees. Shared security protects only explicitly inherited properties and can introduce correlated exposure through common validators, governance, infrastructure, or settlement.

A production treatment of Shared Security should test Shared security lets multiple systems rely on a common validator, consensus, economic, or governance foundation for selected security guarantees within the relevant asset, decision, or service state. The Shared Security context record for consensus, economic, and governance foundation for selected security guarantees should preserve source data, configuration or policy version, responsible actor, exception, and outcome. Review of Shared Security should determine whether safeguards addressing consensus, economic, and governance foundation for selected security guarantees changed exposure in practice, not merely whether a document or setting existed.

Quality review for Shared Security should sample real cases involving consensus, economic, and governance foundation for selected security guarantees, compare expected and actual outcomes, and track unresolved exceptions until remediation is independently verified.